We got home around 5:30 yesterday evening. It was an exhausting trip--lots of joy in seeing family, but a considerable amount of ambient stress as well. Certainly we could have suffered more serious weather tragedies, as many people did, but we suffered enough. Elderly people without power for 36 hours and refusing to leave their home to warm up . . . young people fighting highway blizzards in Canada . . . No more of any of this, please.

Today I'm going to catch up on housework and get groceries into the empty refrigerator and maybe, toward the end of the day, crank out some desk work, but mostly I need a few hours in which I am not dealing with problems. I'll take my exercise class, I'll read Dombey and Son, I'll go for a long walk, and with luck my crisis-management stamina will regenerate.